Many businesses today are capitalizing on the marketing potential of the quickly expanding Internet by providing web sites that are accessible to users on the Internet. Most of these businesses, however, do not have the funding, expertise or desire to purchase required hardware and software and to set-up and maintain these web sites. These businesses typically turn to companies, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), that provide hosting capabilities along with the required technical expertise and equipment to host the business applications, i.e., software used to run a web site.
The maintaining or running of a web site may commonly be referred to as web site hosting. Web site hosting may be provided by a server or a group of servers within a server farm (large grouping of interconnected servers) to host web sites that provide the particular service of a web site owner. Most businesses utilize the ISP to provide and support their specific Internet applications on a server, which is owned by the ISP.
A server farm may be connected to the Internet where one or more of the servers in the server farm each host a business application. A user may access the Internet through a computer commonly referred to as a client. The client may be coupled to the Internet and may be utilized by a user to access the Internet and browse or interact with the application hosted by one or more of the servers in the server farm. The client may communicate with a server in the server farm and vice-versa based upon a suite of communication protocols known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
ISPs typically provide a separate server or group of servers for each business application hosted. Multiple servers (or server groups) with different applications are controlled by an ISP and make up the server farm which is “plugged” into the Internet. Each server in the server farm may be assigned a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address for the lifetime of the server.
The Internet Protocol (IP) address may refer to the network address of the server that is mapped from the domain name entered by the user. For example, a user desiring to access the web site ibm.com may enter the domain name of ibm.com via a browser, e.g., Internet Explorer™, on the client. The domain name ibm.com may then be mapped to a network address of 9.67.111.80 that identifies the particular server hosting the web site ibm.com. This may commonly be referred to as address resolution. Address resolution must be done before the client is connected to the server hosting the web site to be accessed by the client. Commonly, the name resolution information may be stored in a name resolution master file of a server commonly referred to as a domain name server (DNS). That is, the DNS may be used to map the domain name entered by the user to the IP address associated with the server hosting the web site of the domain name.
As stated above, each server in the server farm operated by an ISP is assigned a unique IP address. As the number of servers operated by the ISP to host web sites increases, the larger the number of IP addresses are required. However, only a limited supply of IP addresses are available to be assigned to the expanding number of servers operated by the ISPs.
It would therefore be desirable to dynamically share a limited supply of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses among a larger number of servers.